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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23436 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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I think Scott hit the nail on the head when he said that people feel like they need to do more to keep up. People are nostalgic for the times where you could get hired in the town you were raised and make a good life for yourself. Now you have to compete against the world. I started feeling this way in the 2000's and it's only gotten worse.

Where I disagree with Scott is that CPI is the wonderful and infallible marker of how expensive things have gotten. It's not capturing people's necessary expenses, because necessary expenses have inflated. CPI does hedonistic adjustments.

A flat-screen TV that cost $5,000 in 2000 costs $300 today, and CPI calculations include this decline. But no lower-income family was buying $5,000 flat screens in 2000. Families in 2000 were buying the $300 small boxes. The amount of money a lower-income family spends on TV hasn't gone down, it's stayed flat. They may be getting better bang for their buck and that's significant. But when the question is, "Do you feel like you can afford more than your parents?" The answer is "no." I don't even know where to buy a new CRT TV. Maybe they're cheaper now, but I don't have that option when I go to the electronics store.

The same kinds of adjustments are made for things that legally aren't available anymore. In the past people bought cars without airbags and now we need to buy cars with airbags. The price increase from airbags is factored into the CPI and the CPI says the cost is flat given the upgrade, even if in real dollars it's 5k more. I like having airbags, don't get me wrong. But the previous option is not available. The real cost of car ownership went up, even if that's not, strictly, "Inflation."

The cost of participating in a Middle Class Life has gone up - due to lots of things. High speed internet, computers, and phones are new entrants into "Bare Minimum to participate in the current economy." Cars with more environmental and safety features, mandatory insurance costs, mandatory home features. Meanwhile jobs feel precarious - one wrong move and you'll be replaced by a foreigner or an AI chatbot and no one else will be hiring. Are we right or wrong to think so? I don't know. But that's the vibes part of the vibecession.

A flat-screen TV that cost $5,000 in 2000 costs $300 today, and CPI calculations include this decline. But no lower-income family was buying $5,000 flat screens in 2000. Families in 2000 were buying the $300 small boxes.

Also you cannot try to save money by buying a small box today even if you wanted to, because it’d not even recognize the TV signal and would just be an unusable waste of space.

The amount of money a lower-income family spends on TV hasn't gone down, it's stayed flat. They may be getting better bang for their buck and that's significant.

I'd argue that its' not, not one bit. Back in 2000 nobody cared at all about not having a flat-screen TV for the simple reason that those were not available to average people in a practical sense. Nobody felt one bit poorer due to not owning one, the thought didn't even occur to anyone. The same goes for cell phones without cameras back in the old days. The notion of capturing videos with your phone and posting them online wasn't even on anyone's mind.

The cost of participating in a Middle Class Life has gone up - due to lots of things. High speed internet, computers, and phones are new entrants into "Bare Minimum to participate in the current economy."

I'd argue that lacking a smartphone with installed DM and e-mail apps and a PC/tablet basically locks you out of doing any job that is not undocumented fruit picking.

But the previous option is not available. The real cost of car ownership went up, even if that's not, strictly, "Inflation."

Well not really. It moved from one kind of cost (some probability of splattering your brains on the steering wheel) to another kind of cost (at most 2% at most the cost of a new car).

There was never getting around the cost.

Right, but that doesn't change the fact that the car is now, in fact, more expensive than it was before, which is what a measure of inflation is supposed to capture.

This fraud is revealed when the same discounting principle isn't applied to, say, GDP, or other "good numbers". Oh yes, you bet your ass the extra dollars get counted there. With this neat trick, you get to double, triple, maybe even quadruple count the benefits of a technology or innovation.

Things in the past were going well enough for the common man that there wasn't much to notice here, but now that John Everyman is getting squeezed from all angles, the official numbers are starting to look suspicious. Hard to ignore the dissonance when your typical bag of groceries jumps 20% and the official numbers are still like "3% :)". Becomes clear that the numbers aren't about you or people like you. There's so much witchcraft that goes into these numbers anyway that they are essentially a matter of interpretation rather than fact, and it's becoming clear to a lot of people that it's a picture painted by a club they're not in. And yeah, I guess if you're an upperclassman like Scott is now, it's easy to believe everything's great. But if you're a member of the Rent Food Gas class, you have been getting obliterated.

It's actually difficult for me to believe the level of condescension that these people are speaking to the working class. I couldn't imagine biting the hand that feeds me that hard. Maybe we need a little bit of rising Bolshevism to remind these people who actually runs the place.

Right, but that doesn't change the fact that the car is now, in fact, more expensive than it was before, which is what a measure of inflation is supposed to capture.

Inflation is supposed to compare like-for-like. You can't switch from a Big Mac to a NY Strip and call it inflation, it has to be a fundamentally comparable good.

But if you're a member of the Rent Food Gas class, you have been getting obliterated.

Gas is impossible to game, a gallon is a gallon

You can't switch from a Big Mac to a NY Strip and call it inflation, it has to be a fundamentally comparable good.

Cool, so base the numbers on comparing like goods and stop fucking with them. How is a bureaucrat supposed to measure how much more better the Philly Cheese-steak is? This also doesn't solve the double counting problem. The BLT doesn't count for less dollars in the GDP line go up so shut up data.

EDIT: It also doesn't solve the problem that, in a lot of cases, consumers stopped buying the Big Mac because it was outlawed.

Gas is impossible to game, a gallon is a gallon

Unfortunately, you cannot eat or live in gas.

Buddy, you can't tell people to shut up.

in a lot of cases, consumers stopped buying the Big Mac because it was outlawed

Yes. This is a problem on the regulatory side. And I'm very sympathetic to the claim that a given regulation (say, for backup cameras or whatever) has an unfavorable cost/benefit ratio -- in many cases it's absolutely true. So it's completely valid to say that shitty regulation makes things more expensive, but that isn't inflation.

I think he is saying that the economists are telling the data to go away and stop bothering them, not telling you to shut up.

This is like that "Mandatory booster seats reduce the birth rate" study. A feature that saved the lives of 1:100 prevents the entrance into he middle-class of 10:100.

Don't get me wrong, it's better to be financially stressed than dead. But I am explaining why people's experiences of the economy is not matching up with the markers economists are paying attention to. If economists actually want to figure it out, they need to start here. What is the minimum basket of goods someone needs to buy in order to achieve a "middle class lifestyle" this decade and how many people in each generation can afford it today?

People are nostalgic for the times where you could get hired in the town you were raised and make a good life for yourself.

They're nostalgic, then, for a time their parents don't remember.

I don't even know where to buy a new CRT TV. Maybe they're cheaper now, but I don't have that option when I go to the electronics store.

You can't get a new CRT TV. But I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50. These are strictly superior to the old 20" CRT TVs. $300 gets you up to 50".

But I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50.

This is interesting but kind of besides the point. The point is, Economists are able to say something like, "The cost of TVs has gone down from $5,000 to $300, offsetting the increase of the cost of quality cotton shirts increasing from $10 to $50 (quality meaning of the same threadcount/fabric weight as was common before the 2000s) and the increase of quality jeans from $40 to $130. And so the true cost of things has only increased slowly.

But in reality, people in the middle class in the 1990s bought the $10 shirts and $40 jeans and the $300 CRT and were happy enough, while people in the middle class in the 2020s still spend $300 on TV hardware but also buy jeans and t-shirts that fall apart after 20 wears and feel like it's all a sham.

The numbers that will reflect how people feel about the economy - the vibes - will be the minimum amount it takes to purchase a middle-class lifestyle. Middle class lifestyle is what bundle of goods they feel socially obligated to purchase as reflected to them by their parents, relatives, employers, and the TV. I don't think CPI really tracks this and so CPI isn't going to tell us much about vibes and whether people think they're struggling or not.

I get the impression that Scott used to talk to poor people as their psychiatrist sometimes, listen empathetically to their vibes, and end up with some insight usually unavailable to people in his situation. Lately he listens to people like Bryan Caplan, hires a second nanny, and wonders what the fuss is about. Of course, what with the having a wife and twins and employing servants, it would be unreasonable to hope he would actually go spend some time in a community where the vibes are bad, like Orwell. But then it's unsurprising that he has little of value to add to the conversation, aside from looking at the official statistics, and mostly agreeing with the official narrative.

It would be interesting to hear more interviews by someone fair and not given to ragebait. We bought a second car because the house we could afford is very far from public transport, but when we looked into it, it was post Covid, and the used cars actually cost more than ordering a new car but with worse financing, so we did buy a new car. It then had to fit three car seats across and go down rutted dirt roads, so it's a small SUV not a sedan. Apparently my grandmother, a very respectable person, put her fourth child in the hatchback, but we wouldn't be equally respectable if we couldn't fit the third car seat until our oldest is 7. Both the car and the car seats are certainly better, but also more mandatory.

Yep, my parents were able to have three kids fit in a sedan, and when they bought an SUV it was a choice they made in their 40s because they had the extra cash for the luxury. Meanwhile, the second I got a positive pregnancy test for my third kid, my husband did his research and we traded in our two cars (we each had a car before we married) for a used minivan.

I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50. These are strictly superior to the old 20" CRT TVs.

"Strictly superior" may be a very slight overstatement, since IIRC these super-cheap televisions are subsidized by built-in advertisements. Maybe "strictly superior in 95 percent of graded areas (all except built-in advertisements)" would be more accurate.

From what I understand, you can buy displays that are sold without advertising, referred to as 'Commercial Displays'.

The issue is that you're then paying full-price, and no longer paying 50$s. Instead, you're paying something along the lines of 350$.

link to category "digital signage", filtered by "size: 24 inches"

Better links:

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